Author Archive | Aaron Glass

Since its inception, Material World has treated museums and archives not only as repositories of material culture, but as material culture–that is, material products as well as producers of culture and social memory. As institutions, they are sites of collection and exhibition, acts that have their own material and materializing dimensions.

Here are some of our favorite posts about museums, exhibitions, archives, and memorials:

Anna Weinrich examines two permanent museum exhibitions in Australia featuring Aboriginal culture and collections by a foundational anthropologist, testing out the new museology against the politics of Aboriginal voice.

Diana Young discusses her curatorial efforts to enliven museum collections in dialogue with Aboriginal artists.…

These items belonged to a family of four who spent a night in the mountains before arriving in El-Qaa in the northern region of the Bekaa Valley. Their new home was a makeshift tent on agricultural land. Rent was covered by working in the fields for the Lebanese farmer. The children grabbed the teddy bear and soft toy. The mother grabbed a box that she knew the torch was in. All the other items just happened to be in the same box. Even though some of it is useless, such as a TV remote, they could not bring themselves to discard it.

Earlier this year, artist George Butler spent several days in the refugees’ ‘tented settlements’ of northern Lebanon. His portraits of the people – and the often random possessions they brought with them when they fled their homes – tell their own poignant tales.…

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers and Visual Projects for the Conference Studies and Dialogues between Anthropology and Art organized by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. The conference will take place in Lima on November 19-21, 2014.

The keynote speakers for our conference will be Dr. George Marcus, Chancellor´s Professor of Anthropology at University of California Irvine, and Dr. Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University.

The deadline for submissions is August 05, 2014. The language of the Conference will be Spanish. For more information and conference updates, please visit our website at seminario.pucp.edu.pe/antropologia-arte/

We’ve just launched a new heritage visualisation project at the University of York & I’m hopeful you might be keen to participate and/or spread the word. Thank you in advance for your interest!

Are you concerned with the way the past is presented? Have you ever worked with (or wished you could work with) art, photos, video, diagrams, websites or other forms of graphic and performance pieces in the context of interpreting the archaeological and heritage records? Are you interested to innovate with the visualisation of history and prehistory?

If so, we invite your participation in The Heritage Jam (www.heritagejam.org), a collaborative global event in heritage visualisation, taking place both online and in-person on the 11th of July 2014 at the University of York.…

Abstracts of 300 words with full contact details should be sent as soon as
possible but no later than 15th December 2014 toironbridge@contacts.bham.ac.uk

Trans-Atlantic dialogues on cultural heritage began as early as the voyages
of Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus and continue through the present
day. Each side of the Atlantic offers its own geographical and historical
specificities expressed and projected through material and immaterial
heritage. However, in geopolitical terms and through everyday mobilities,
people, objects and ideas flow backward and forward across the ocean, each
shaping the heritage of the other, for better or worse, and each shaping the
meanings and values that heritage conveys.…

“Mayha.” Credit: Hossein Fatemi/Panos Pictures. Reposted from the New York Times.

The New York Times recently ran this photo essay by the Iranian documentary photographer Hossein Fatemi of diverse women in Tehran posing behind veils of one sort or another, accompanied by a short commentary critiquing the imposition of the hijab on secular women there. While the piece ran in the “Review” (opinion) section of the Sunday print edition, it was featured online — without the commentary — as a “Fashion and Style” slideshow.

While some scholars have understood the activity of overseas Christian missionaries primarily in terms of a ‘Colonization of Consciousness’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1992), a range of recent scholarship has also emphasised the profoundly material dimensions of much missionary activity. While religious conversion was never unimportant historically, many missionaries have been equally heavily involved in practical projects to remake the world. Their global projects have transformed landscapes, forms of architecture and modes of dress, but have also shaped underlying narratives of modernity and modernisation (Keane 2007).

This flagship international conference will bring scholars from different disciplines together with heritage professionals to explore the global networks of exchange established by Christian missionary organisations, the materials that circulated through these, and the transformational effects these exchanges had in many different parts of the world, including Europe itself.

Japan is widely regarded as an exemplar in terms of the preservation of material integrity, the perpetuation of historical production techniques and the responsible preservation of works of architecture and artifacts in museum contexts. The Japanese certification system for Cultural Property – which also includes the category of Living National Treasures for specialist craftsmen who embody manufacturing techniques as Intangible Cultural Property – has earned far-reaching acclaim. It is frequently overlooked, however, that there is actually a wide range of divergent approaches towards originality and authenticity even in contemporary Japan. While some of these inconsistencies find their counterparts in the West, others are related to pre-modern cultural practices, e.g.…

In celebration of the first ever Museum Week, Berghahn Journals is delighted to offer you free access to two special virtual issues. The first features a collection of articles from eleven of our journals spanning multiple disciplines which deliver scholarly and informed opinion on museum studies. Article topics include: Museums and Education, Museums and Memorials, and Museums and Society. The second virtual issue is a collection of exhibit reviews from our new journal, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research.

The workshop is one of the concluding elements of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award entitled Tibetan Collections in Scotland 1890-1930: using material culture to establish a critical historiography of missionary and military intent. The project examined the ways in which, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Tibetan artefacts were collected and displayed in Scottish museums, particularly in the Edinburgh museum (now National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh). The Principal Investigator was Dr Timothy Fitzgerald (University of Stirling), with Dr Henrietta Lidchi (National Museums Scotland), and Dr Michael Marten (University of Stirling). The bulk of the research was carried by Inbal Livne, who will shortly be awarded her PhD.…